Tag: 03.24.20

What Dancers Are Doing To Maintain During Lockdown

The recently interrupted tours, canceled premieres, locked studios and social distancing requirements have hit the financially fragile, socially enmeshed dance world hard. When your life revolves around lifting, leaping, catching, jumping and otherwise spending time (often literally joined at the hip) with your dance partners, how do you deal with solitary confinement? – Washington Post

Librarians: If We Can’t Lend Books During Lockdown, Let’s Make Our Buildings And Bookmobiles Wi-Fi Hotspots

“The [American Library Association] urged the FCC to waive E-rate restrictions so libraries could not only offer [free] Wi-Fi access via local libraries, but could also provide broadband service to disconnected communities via bookmobiles and mobile hotspots without running afoul of FCC rules.” – Vice

Remembering Terrence McNally

Perhaps the most important comic voice in theater since Neil Simon, McNally wrote to amuse and awaken. Laughter for him was the greatest survival tool ever invented. Humor was his shield against the homophobia he experienced as a Catholic boy growing up in Texas, against the losses that rained down on him and his community during the worst days of the AIDS crisis and against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — which in showbiz is even more outrageous than usual. – Los Angeles Times

Albert Uderzo, Co-Creator Of Astérix The Gaul, Dead At 92

“Born colorblind and with six fingers on each hand, [he] became one of the world’s most acclaimed cartoonists, known for drawing characters that ranged from the sword-wielding Astérix — with his winged helmet, bulbous nose and horseshoe mustache — to the roly-poly Obélix, a stonemason who joins Astérix in defending their village from Roman legionaries.” – The Washington Post

What Will America’s Arts Economy Be Like After COVID? How Can Artists Survive? (It’s Not A Pretty Picture)

Zach Finkelstein does not sugar-coat the situation: “The tragic irony of this crisis is that, in the post-COVID era, the person most likely to have a performance career will be the one that can last the longest without performing. … The most effective route to survival in the post-COVID word will require artists to build another set of marketable skills, with training to start immediately.” – The Middle-Class Artist

Yvonne Rainer Creates An At-Home Dance For Coronavirus Quarantine

Brian Seibert: “She calls it Passing and Jostling While Being Confined to a Small Apartment. It’s a dance history exercise [for Seibert’s class at Yale], but it occurred to me that it might double as a diversion for people now cooped up at home; it’s something that anyone can attempt, carefully. Ms. Rainer agreed. So here I can present her first dance for the socially isolated.” – The New York Times

San Francisco Art Institute Stops Enrolling Students, Prepares To Lay Off Faculty And Staff

The nearly 150-year-old school, which counts Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, and Dorothea Lange as former faculty, says that it can’t continue to operate in the near term unless it joins a larger and more stable institution. Administrators expect to cancel all fall semester classes. Students graduating this spring will get their degrees; others are being strongly encouraged to transfer elsewhere. – San Francisco Chronicle